Abstract
Millionaires in their automobiles enjoyed a new monopoly of the public roads but at the cost of provoking great animosity from the broader public. The “scorcher” (speeder) menace led to efforts to impose speed limits and other restrictions on automobiles, which the tycoons through their auto clubs successfully fought. Through these struggles automobile racing was firmly connected in the public imagination with the privileges and excesses of the wealthy.
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Notes
Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 176.
New York Times, Jan. 23, 1902, p. 1; The Horseless Age, 7:23 (Mar. 6, 1901), p. 14. Historians of the early period of motor cars took note of the rural antagonism toward automobiles but chalked it up to rural backwardness or general suspicion of “city folks:” (Michael L. Berger, The Devil Wagon in God’s Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America, 1893–1929 [Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979], c.f., 13–28.)
McShane, Down the Asphalt Path, p. 180; Xenophon P. Huddy, The Law of Automobiles (Albany: Matthew Bender & Co., 1906).
Agnes Louis Provost, “Senate Bill 22: The Secret History of a Mysterious Legislative Failure,” Munsey’s Magazine, 29:2 (May 1903), pp. 188–194.
Chauffeur Chaff or Automobilia, Charles Welsh, ed. (H.M. Caldwell Co.: Boston, 1905), p. 14.
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© 2014 Timothy Messer-Kruse
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Messer-Kruse, T. (2014). Scorcher Rule. In: Tycoons, Scorchers, and Outlaws: The Class War That Shaped American Auto Racing. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322517_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322517_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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